Fortune: Finland's Universal Basic Income Experiment Just Gave Lawmakers a Really Good Reason to Back the Idea

In its first report, Kela said the basic income didn’t much affect the amount of work that the subjects picked up during the experiment, but it did make them feel healthier and less stressed, and more confident about their ability to find work. [...]

Here’s where it gets interesting for lawmakers. According to Kela: “Respondents who received a basic income had more trust in other people and in societal institutions—politicians, political parties, police and the courts—than members of the control group.” [...]

On a scale of 0 to 10, where higher numbers denote more trust, basic income recipients gave an average score of 6.8 for trust in other people, versus 6.3 in the control group. Trust in politicians and political parties got an average 4.5 among basic income recipients and 4.0 in the control group, and trust in courts and cops was 7.2 versus 6.9, again with the control group providing a lower score.[...]

In the U.S., a universal basic income is one of the core proposals of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who maintains that it would not make people lazier. The preliminary Finnish results seem to back him up on that. Kela’s survey, conducted just before the end of the two-year experiment, also showed that those who received the basic income were just as willing to use official job-finding services as those who did not.

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The New York Review of Books: Is Tunisia Ready for Gender Equality?

And yet to many Tunisians that accomplishment feels scant. Since 2011, Tunisia has held several free elections. It has weathered terrorist attacks, deep polarization between Islamists and secularists, and the evident desire of elements of the old regime to turn back the clock. But its leaders have been unable or unwilling to enact economic reforms that would deliver the greater growth and equality that were among the people’s fundamental demands. “In the last four years, we achieved stability, we protected the state,” Abdelhamid Jelassi, a senior member of the Islamist Ennahda party, which is part of the governing coalition, told me. “But we didn’t turn stability into wealth. People don’t eat stability.” [...]

Inheritance inequality is the “bedrock” of discrimination against women, Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, the head of COLIBE, told me: “It’s at the center of all discrimination: cultural, economic, social—it’s about power.” Hmida is a lawyer, the cofounder of a major feminist association, and a parliamentarian. When the law was proposed, most of Tunisia’s imams preached against it in their Friday sermons. Bel Haj Hmida was targeted personally—the law was often referred to as “Bochra’s law,” and she received insults and death threats on social media. The debate spread beyond the borders of Tunisia. Scholars at the Islamic institute of Al Azhar in Egypt—one of the Arab world’s oldest universities—denounced the idea.

The COLIBE report made a number of other far-reaching recommendations intended to harmonize the country’s laws with the principles of its constitution. It suggested ending capital punishment, decriminalizing homosexuality, and ensuring greater protections for detainees during the garde à vue, the initial period they are held by police before being charged. But President Essebsi has focused almost exclusively on inheritance. On August 13, National Women’s Day in Tunisia, he announced he would be proposing a law to make inheritance equal. The law has now been approved by the cabinet and submitted to the country’s fractious parliament, where it could be discussed and voted on in the following months. Or it could go nowhere, used as a bargaining chip in a much larger political game or stalled and buried, as so many laws and reforms have been in recent years.[...]

Ennahda has decided to vote against the inheritance reform, Labidi told me. “We represent conservative people,” she said. “And when this project was made public a majority of Tunisians rejected it.” The party is willing to introduce an amendment that would allow people to stipulate that they want to divide their inheritance equally, but it insists that the traditional sharia-based division should be the default. The proposed law does the opposite, making equal separation of property automatic unless someone opts out. Both sides know that the default option will be the prevalent one.

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UnHerd: Just how harmful is porn?

Exactly what percentage of men watch porn isn’t clear, but it’s most of them. In 2009, a University of Montreal researcher tried to do a study on how pornography affects men, and couldn’t find any men in their 20s who hadn’t used it to use as a control group. This study found 98% of men (and 73% of women) had used it in the last six months. This one found 87% of men report using it for sexual purposes, along with 31% of women. [...]

This runs a big risk of creating a database of sexual preferences and porn habits, in the hands of providers with varying abilities to protect it. This sort of thing has happened before: the “dating site for married people”, Ashley Madison, was hacked in 2015. It became something of a feeding frenzy for extortionists, and there were reports of suicides linked to the leak. A lot more people use porn than use skeevy hookup sites for affairs. And it’d be OK for those of us with vanilla proclivities, but for people with unusual or hidden kinks, it could be awful. [...]

I want to be charitable, though. The Government’s impact assessment is embarrassingly bad, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no impact to assess. I spoke to Dr Victoria Nash of the Oxford Internet Institute: she took part in a major review of the evidence in 2015. She said that they found that establishing the evidence of harm is extremely difficult. “There’s a really limited evidence base,” she said. “There are many studies looking at impact on young people but it’s very hard to draw strong conclusions from them.” [...]

You may think that adults shouldn’t be allowed to view porn either, of course. It’s a legitimate viewpoint, although I will point out that there is no evidence that I am aware of that, as was the fear a few years ago, porn use leads to sexual violence. If anything the correlation is the other way around – countries and states with higher porn use experience lower levels of rape and sexual assault. It may be causal, but the author of the study I just linked to says that it’s probably just because countries with liberal porn laws also tend to be more progressive generally. There was also a recently released study which found that once you control for confounding factors, there’s no link between porn consumption and adolescents’ psychological wellbeing, even in girls.

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CityLab: Why Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Night Trains

The Swedish government announced Sunday that it will fund the creation of overnight train services from Sweden to the European mainland. According to a statement from the Social Democrat-Green coalition government, the state will pump 50 million Kronor ($5.3 million) into creating night links by train to major European destinations, as part of a drive to give Swedes more low-carbon ways to travel long distances. [...]

The new funding will be used to research which routes would be most in demand, and to find companies able to run the service. This could possibly mean side-stepping the national rail company SJ (Statens Järnvägar), which currently runs one international night service (from Stockholm to Narvik, Norway) but recently said it would wait a decade before introducing night services to the European mainland. That delay would be in order to wait for the construction of an 11-mile-long rail tunnel between Denmark and Germany called the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, which would reduce the journey time by train from Copenhagen to Hamburg from five hours to just two.[...]

While changes in the travel industry have tended to pressure night trains off the market, it’s clear that there is still some appetite for them among travelers. When Germany’s Deutsche Bahn halted its night services in 2017, Austrian Federal Railways took over some of the key routes. The takeover has proved to be a success, with passenger numbers on the services (whose conditions are outlined here) rising from 1.4 million to 1.6 million between 2017 and 2018, a rise in profits, and talk of expansion. Meanwhile, well-established leisure services such as the London-to-Scotland Caledonian Sleeper continue to thrive.

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TLDR Explains: Do Protests Actually Work?

A couple weeks ago around a million people headed to London to protest Brexit. It made a big splash in the media, but realistically it's not going to stop Brexit from happening. So we discuss the purpose of protests and why people actually take part.